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First, let’s agree that safety is a human need. Studies find that children who grow up amidst threats, violence and insecurity are less likely to thrive as grown-ups. The defensiveness induced by trauma gets in the way of creativity and the learning curve needed for achievement.

The anti-oppression movement long ago began to create safe spaces. As a gay man, I remember the first time I saw on the door of a campus office a triangle, signifying that this would be a safe place for me. Surrounded by rampant homophobia, I relaxed as I turned the doorknob.

I also took the sign on the door to be a sign of sensitivity; here might be a heterosexual ally who has empathy for my frequent encounters with prejudice, even the mild expressions that could remind me of scary or hurtful incidents. That sequence – mild expression jumping to vividly remembered hurtful incidents – later became the basis for some teachers offering to give “trigger warnings” before wading into sensitive information.

Safety is a human need, like eating. Our need to eat, however, doesn’t mean we need to eat all the time. Any human need exists in balance with other needs, one of which is a sense of agency. By agency I mean knowing our power, our ability to operate in a variety of circumstances, our acceptance of the responsibility to determine the course of our own lives.

“Don’t help me,” my six-year-old granddaughter sometimes says, as she wrestles with a challenging task and sees me preparing to intervene. Ella knows the delicious satisfaction of her own agency and is impatient with the well-meaning, but clumsy “helping” some grown-ups are prone to. She is on her way to being a high-achieving powerhouse, like Wonder Woman, her favorite character. I’ve learned in the swimming pool that the scariness of water generates fears Ella wants to handle; it would be no favor to protect her. I stay nearby while she takes the risks that support her power and growing self-confidence.

For this reason, I want to raise the question of whether the current preoccupation with safety and protection has gone too far.

Acknowledging the middle-class cultural theme of protection

In the early days of gay and women’s liberation and the black freedom movement, we were highly critical of mainstream culture. We knew that mainstream culture was dead wrong in enforcing white supremacy, say, or misogyny, so why should we assume it was right about anything else? We gave ourselves permission to question everything.

As liberation movements grow they come under enormous pressure to accept middle-class mainstream assumptions. Their cultural critique weakens and dubious assumptions creep in unnoticed. For the anti-oppression movement, I believe that one of those assumptions is the middle-class value of over-protection. “Really good parents” in the mainstream don’t allow their children to go outside unsupervised because parents show how good they are by how much they protect children from something that might happen. “Really good homemakers” use germ-killers at every opportunity because parents show how good they are by how much they protect children from something that might sicken them.

Fortunately, push-back is happening on both those fronts — first from parents who remember happy hours of childhood freedom, and second from medical people who wonder if the growth of allergies is related to the weakened immune systems of children who don’t have enough germs in their lives. On both fronts, the result is over-protection that weakens children and reduces their agency. Note the subtle dynamic of class here. Protection as obligation is especially strong in the middle class, and is generalized therefore into a hierarchy: higher-status people (who of course know better) expect themselves to ensure the safety of lower-status people.

What is now called the anti-oppression movement began with a liberatory critique but now seems to have absorbed the mainstream narrative that protection is what makes higher status people “good allies.” One way this plays out in workshops is that the facilitator is expected to use ground rules, their own authority, and other methods to protect and keep “safe” everyone in the group who might otherwise experience offensive behavior.

As I watch this long-term trend I wonder what’s happening to the agency of oppressed people subjected to this mainstream assumption. Are marginalized individuals in a group excused from standing up for themselves and fighting out differences with other group members that might arise? Are higher-status people coming to believe that oppressed people are by definition weak or even fragile? It wouldn’t be the first time that the attitudes of do-gooders diminished others, participating in the disempowerment of those they intended to help.

Many of us have lived the pro-liberation version of movements, as we came to terms with an oppressed identity or in our role as allies or both. In the 1970s, I — an “out” gay white man — taught in an Ivy League university. In my course I found more African American students showing up each semester, seeking refuge from their wider experience of dominant white norms. In the course’s three-hour experiential classes and weekend retreat, minority students renewed their determination to maintain their integrity.

We had no ground rules because I had no interest in creating a germ-free environment. Oppressive behaviors including racism showed up and useful conflicts erupted; students’ power — their immune systems — grew. The course became popular because I supported black students to tackle for themselves the white-dominated world, maintaining their critical stance. They, and other marginalized students, empowered themselves. One result was a degree of community that was unheard of in a course in a huge university.

The trigger warning — a second look

Liberation/empowerment trainer Daniel Hunter pointed out to me that the demand for “safe space” easily loses track of real life. Individuals seeking safety in a classroom may imagine that a racist statement or behavior is the same as actual harm or danger. They confuse subjective feeling and objective reality. The confusion is compounded when others buy in, believing that strong feelings should rule. In the name of sensitivity, a group culture can join the historical narrative that turns oppressed people into poor victims.

The group’s (or teacher’s) confusion here assumes that upset feelings overrule a person’s innate ability to think and act well under stress. We can test this belief. If subjective feelings control us, then surely the objective experience of harm and danger prevents us from thinking and acting smartly, right?

If we believed that, we would have to re-write history. Black Lives Matters in Minneapolis would not have come back to the police precinct house in November after the white supremacists attacked them because — since they’d been shot at — it wasn’t safe. The entire civil rights movement would never have happened, nor the workers movement, nor the women’s or LGBT or disability rights movement. None of these waited for safety to strategize smartly and act effectively.

People can of course be brilliant while scared or hurt — unless they believe otherwise. The quickest scan of successful social movement history shows not only what a lie the belief is, but also how delighted the 1 percent must be to watch anti-oppression extremists undermine every movement within reach.

Doesn’t the trigger warning expectation invite lower expectations of ourselves and others? When the technique is institutionalized, it suggests that oppressed people are too fragile to handle symbolic representations of oppression, much less able to handle oppression in real life. In my experience, the truth is otherwise: It is usually people with privilege who are fragile and can’t deal with what oppressed people often handle well. (I’m talking about class again. Sorry about that, but we do pay a price for letting the anti-oppression forces avoid interrogating their class.)

The dearth of vision in demands for ‘safe space’ and ‘trigger warnings’

I admit I’m an elder with high expectations. I expect movements that make many demands to have a vision of what it is they seek. If the goal is to produce hot-house plants that cannot survive without the protection of others (higher-status others, of course), admit it.

My vision is of humans working to realize their full potential, supported by their cultures to act powerfully in the world to transform institutions. Folk wisdom offers a motto to guide us as we work: “Smooth seas train poor sailors.” I hope for comments from readers about how we can support everyone’s power to act for liberation.

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George Lakey co-founded Earth Quaker Action Group which just won its five-year campaign to force a major U.S. bank to give up financing mountaintop removal coal mining. Along with college teaching he has led 1,500 workshops on five continents and led activist projects on local, national, and international levels. Among many other books and articles, he is author of “Strategizing for a Living Revolution” in David Solnit’s book Globalize Liberation (City Lights, 2004). His first arrest was for a civil rights sit-in and most recent was with Earth Quaker Action Team while protesting mountain top removal coal mining.

17 comments

Thank you George for this. I would love to have further clarification, I feel confused with how strong feelings override objective reality. I have been in an NVC study group. One member complained that she didn’t feel safe about new members coming into the group. The group spent a long time trying to design rules which would enable her to feel safe. I felt uncomfortable with spending all this time designing the group around her needs, but I couldn’t really say what I felt was wrong with it. it was something to do with my not wanting to be in a support group. I felt also that other people were being much kinder than me, able to take her needs into account, and I felt bad that I was reluctant to. What you say here about over protection gives me a new perspective on that.

It might help to ask each group we’re in that has as one of its goals supporting the individuals in it to learn, to make the distinction Ryan makes in their comment: to distinguish between “safety” and “comfort.” Group members that want to grow need to accept that growth is uncomfortable. Growth happens at our edge. Growth requires risk — to entertain a new idea, examine an old belief, try a new behavior that feels awkward or scary. That’s why Outward Bound is such a personal growth-producer — it’s about risk and trying new behaviors and feeling the feelings that go with that. When I climb a tree in Adventure-Based Learning I shake with fear, my mouth goes dry, cold sweat soaks my shirt. That’s when I know I’m alive, doing what humans do which is to heal and grow past old limitations. (Feeling and bodily expressing feelings is one of nature’s methods for healing. Check out trauma therapy.)

Everyone I’ve asked has been able to tell me an important learning they’ve gained at a time when the process itself has been very uncomfortable! Affluenza is a sickness in which people have the belief that “comfort” is their life goal. Learning groups that are serious about their mission must incorporate discomfort or they fail in their mission — it’s that straightforward.

Then there’s the huge question of action: when do we not only experience discomfort but actually, objectively, risk harm, injury, even death? I believe major social change movements need people willing to take that risk, as I have and countless others have. A culture of “safety first” is the wrong culture to be interested in justice, because justice requires major change, and major change requires real risk of harm and injury and even death. Nonviolent strategy minimizes injury and death, but of course the choice of defending injustice with violence is sometimes the choice an opponent makes. Nothing surprising about that.

As Gandhi pointed out over and over again, if you allow your fear of violence to keep you from action, then you are colluding in the injustice itself. You are handing your power over to the opponent, saying, “Threaten me, and I’ll back down.” How could people involved with NONVIOLENT Communication go along with rendering themselves powerless, or saying it’s OK for someone in their group to shut themselves down and give up agency in their lives?

The huge contradiction among anti-oppression extremists is to say they are for racial justice, for example, and then to perpetrate a comfort-loving culture (even a safety-loving culture) that prevents people from working for racial justice, since that work requires guaranteed discomfort and the risk of genuine danger!

I realize you are referring to a support group that has already started and doesn’t have the benefit of being able to discuss what kind of culture it wants to create at the start. Still, you could say at mid-point that you need the kind of rigorous group whose mission is very clearly personal growth, and if others can’t accept that you’ll need to create another group that’s up for it.

These are hard times. We can’t afford the luxury of what Barbara Wien agrees is self-indulgence.

The distinction between ‘safety’ and ‘comfort’ is really helpful, and also behind that the belief that the most we can do is provide cosy spaces away from the noise and disharmony out there. Though each person’s threshold may differ we could agree that the aim is to stay open to learning and growth, which will often be uncomfortable. That is why I object to the term ‘support group’, which seems to point more towards the ‘cosy space’.

However when it comes to risk of injury and even death, I cannot follow you. I could never climb trees because the fear paralysed me. But physical courage is not the only, or necessarily the most effective way to deal with violence. Marshall Rosenberg, who founded Non-violent Communication, approved using force for self protection, or to protect others, but also saw that it would not achieve the real change that needs to happen. The willingness to risk your life is not an indication of a deeper commitment to social justice. Not being prepared to risk your life is not colluding with injustice. That sort of heroism is sold with militarism, patriotism, and religious fundamentalism. While I understand the desperation that such self sacrifice springs from, we can find alternative, more fruitful, ways to maintain our agency, express our power.

People around me sometimes argue for safe spaces and trigger warnings by saying that we, as campaigners and movement builders, should be creating a world that’s better and safer (although this really means “more comfortable,” I think) than the world “out there.”

I think that argument comes from a belief that we can’t change structures, so the second-best we can do is carve out places where individuals can be comfortable, and not too challenged. If we dream a little bigger, as you say, about liberation and concrete wins, maybe we’ll feel less need to clutch on to the myth and short term thinking that have us believing that “germ-free” (discomfort-free) groups are healthy.

I think you only scratched the surface of examining how class oppression and anti-oppression play into one another. I’d love to hear more!

Thank you for this very thoughtful essay. The author of “The Coddling of America” would benefit from reading your piece. I agree we must not shy away from controversy. Yes, affluent people can be very self-indulgent. Discomfort and airing differences can be healthy. Skillfully-facilitated conflicts move groups forward. Regrettably, many people are conflict-avoiders and have not learned the art of rigorous, political, CIVIL discourse. Differences are submerged and erupt in bizarre ways (hence all the vitriol in the U.S. Presidential race). If our communities engaged in healthy dialogues we wouldn’t need to avoid sensitivities. Our classrooms and NGOs should model such courageous conversations. It’s not a matter of avoiding sensitivities, but rather what we do with the new insights.

I teach courses on gender violence and peace-building. I do give ‘trigger warnings’ because the readings can be graphic or explicit. My female students (1 in 3 who have been sexually assaulted) are NOT the ones in need of warning. Rather, my male students asked for triggers. They were devastated by what they read, and said they would have appreciated some forewarning to better fortify themselves. Some male students had difficulty focusing and getting through their day. This is secondary trauma (I experience it during violent movies, shake & can’t sleep). Trigger warnings can be important to help prepare learners to absorb powerful, vivid, new information. I don’t treat my students like “hot house plants” (love your analogy), but nor do I scorch them with a heat lamp. This doesn’t mean I don’t think they have agency. I offer them opportunities to act on what they’ve learned. Research shows that one way to heal from tragedy or crisis is to take action in the service of others, and join in something larger than yourself. But first they have to be able to hear the pain of others and not shut down from defensiveness or as coping.

I have been part of large group therapy and other processes for decades and we sometimes said we were creating safer spaces – but that implies it is work, not a given state. It came from having arguments and differences, often hotly expressed, and then working through them.

That seems to capture something of what George is saying when he write, ” I shake with fear, my mouth goes dry, cold sweat soaks my shirt.”

However that needs the openess for people to express things in ways that annoy others and then the commitment to working through it. Few activist groups that I am familiar with are skilled enough or happy to let that to happen. They often want serious conflict to be dealt with out of the room as that is what they have seen at work- but that implies there is a managerial postion to do that – someone in charge to take the angry and wounded parties outside to sort things out.

On the other hand I am a shaky, moderatly traumatised and easily distressed person who is sometimes rude and snarky and who finds it hard to opperate in groups where there is pressure to bottle it up and where conflict is surpressed.

Sometimes in therapy land people talk of Holding and Containment. I think that means that group leaders have the skill and commitment to not let the conflict to get so out of hand the group is totally overwhelmed and also to stop bullying (though that is sometimes subjective and hard to tell what is bullying and what is legitimate conflict) but also to encourage people to stay with it so the conflict has the best chance of being worked out.

Sometimes I think activists like to see, “The Enemy,” on the outside, and avoid all conflict and the messy emotions that go with it within thier groups.

I have a stories to illustrate this but I don’t think this forum is the right place to do it. I’ll just say you can’t make an omlette without breaking eggs but you don’t want to use a sledge hammer either.

I ran theatre based consultancy for mental health service users. We had no trigger warnings. We touched on difficult subjects like intimations of surviving childhood sexual assault or depictions of self harm.

Someone once ran out, distressed. But she had come in late, just as the most distressing material, that was pertinant to her life, was being acted out.

We talked to her later and she was fine. She said maybe we could have a peer supporter by the door in case anyone was distressed at future events and maybe we should warn people of the content? But maybe not? Maybe we could just make sure no one came in late next time? It was a mental health day centre and these things are the reality of people’s lives.

We did have a peer supporter at the next show. We probably said that the show contained distressing material but in a way that said that we hoped we would together be able to deal with things though people could leave at any point if they wanted to.

It is not about “offensive behavior.” It is about “oppressive dynamics.” Which “privileged people” are taught to replicate, so many even do it unconsciously. Yet to any normal person, it’s obvious and obnoxious. Counterproductive to effectively achieving your goals.

When you’re on a team of people, you really don’t need oppressive dynamics making everything pointlessly hard. (Just like society’s usual institutions make everything pointlessly hard even though we have the tech level to basically have utopia.) We’re used to it, we don’t need more training.

And what is a “facilitator”? Are they all the same? Or are many just currently incompetent (we all are to some extent) and don’t sufficiently learn from mistakes?

I know nothing about the author’s 1970s courses. That was half a century ago. We’d have to watch a video and consider his inevitable mistakes. (After all, I learn from mistakes I made just last week.) Starhawk (the author of books on facilitating consensus) explained how she had to make many mistakes in the 1980’s so now it’s all considered obvious nowadays.

Forget allies. “There is no such thing as an ally. Sometimes there is someone lifting their foot a little off the oppression pedal. That’s it.” https://twitter.com/shanley/status/678045399987261440 Most of the time we’re benefiting at least passively (often actively) from whatever supremacy we’re were born into.

I agree with you, Calisto, that the deeper issue is oppressive dynamics. What we in Training for Change have been working toward is a set of tools that assist real empowerment to happen in a group — empowerment for people on both sides of a set of oppressive dynamics like racism to be able to take action for liberation. Here’s a specific example of using such a tool, from a recent workshop I led:

In a workshop where most participants were of color, I facilitated a first-session exercise called Maximize/Minimize the Value of a Learning Experience. The tool elicits self-responsibility and encourages mutual self-disclosure. When we came to the list of minimizing behaviors, one of the participants offered: “I let a condescending attitude shut me down.”

At that point I said, “It occurs to me that condescension is an attitude I sometimes show as an expression of my racism. Sometimes my white racism shows up in a kind of patronizing or condescending way.”

The group began to buzz with questions and concerns. Participants of color argued about what it might mean to them that the trainers was acknowledging his racism. White participants became silent, realizing that the work of the people of color needed space.

The participants of color gradually reached a consensus that I was OK as their facilitator and there was benefit to my being aware of racist dynamics. The workshop went extremely well, with free and lively interaction by the participants of color as well as the whites. At the evaluation period in the end of the workshop, several participants of color remarked how refreshing it was to have racism addressed in the beginning, so the issue didn’t come up again and again as it often did in other workshops they’d attended.

That’s just one of the tools that I share in the chapters on anti-oppression/pro-liberation work in my book “Facilitating Group Learning,” available from TrainingForChange.org. (Starhawk calls the book “an invaluable resource.”) As you say, Calisto, this area is a work in progress for all of us, and we’ll know more in a decade about it than we do now. We do find at Training for Change, though, that far more empowerment happens especially for people with oppressed identities when we abandon the attempt in a group to “legislate away oppressive dynamics” and instead build people’s capacity to deal with dynamics as they arise. It’s going to be the world “out there,” outside the room, where people must act powerfully and take down the institutions that keep the oppression going.

Learning the skills, and using he tools, of nonviolent communication is critical in addressing some of the concerns raised in this article. But NVC often falls short of being effective in group settings. There is another discipline called Collaborative Negotiation that is built upon a foundation of NVC. It offers a method for using NVC to discover the underlying needs of the positions of all parties in a conflict and then collaborating to find the unique solution to that conflict. Another effective discipline to utilize within groups is Formal Consensus as described by C. T. Butler and Amy Rothstein in their pamphlet “On Conflict and Consensus.” All of these need to be part of any comprehensive nonviolence training course.

My response, Carl, is that so much depends on the goals. If we’re doing team or community-building, those tools are an important resource, although even then to downplay the value of open, strong and emotionally authentic conflict is a danger if one wants to reach the deeper “power-with” available in a group (Starhawk’s term). Check out Scott Peck’s book, “The Different Drum,” or Arnold Mindell’s “Sitting in the Fire.” It’s amazing how many groups will skate on the surface as long as they can, avoiding the open and hot expression of conflict even though it is the most likely path to what is called “a high performance team” or “authentic community.”

My problem about using the phrase “nonviolence training” as synonymous with what turns out to be “conflict resolution” is that I so honor the association of “nonviolence” with Dr. King (I’m writing on his weekend) and Gandhi and Chavez and Alice Paul and Susan B. Anthony and Barbara Deming. All these and more were quite clear that when our goals are justice or peace and our means are nonviolent, we must empower people to stand up and, well, fight! These were nonviolent warriors and, like early Quakers, they went way out of their way to start fights and organize confrontations. Thank goodness.

So when NVC and Formal Consensus are used to assist under-socialized and rugged individualists to be able to work well together, I use them, but when they simply offer a lot of “work-arounds” so middle class people can avoid being real with each other or postpone standing up for themselves, well, then I don’t. If there’s a heaven where I get to look Deming or Gandhi in the eye, I don’t want to be too embarrassed.

This is a very thoughtful and thought-provoking essay, George, and I’ve been turning it over a lot in my mind since reading it a couple of days ago. I know it’s been two weeks since you originally posted it, but I hope you’ll respond to my comment, because I have a great deal of confusion around some of these issues, which I’d like to hear your perspective on.

As a largely privileged activist who has no direct personal experience of trauma, I often take my cues on these issues from those of my comrades who have more direct personal experiences of oppression and trauma than I. (i.e., if I want to get an idea how I can support people who have been deeply hurt by misogyny, I’m going to listen mostly and most closely to female-bodied and -identified persons.)

It is coming from this background that I have come down on the side of defending safe spaces and especially trigger warnings. I’ll come back to the latter in a minute.

The distinction between “comfort” and “safety” was one which came to my mind whilst slogging through the Atlantic’s “The Coddling of the American Mind” article a couple of months ago. Even “safety” is, as you note, a problematic and to some extent middle- or owning-class obsession; for many less privileged people, there is no true “safety,” just relative levels of security. It occurs to me that perhaps “risk aware” is a better term – as you point out, sometimes it is necessary to risk pain, trauma, even death to overcome oppression, but a person who is appraised of and psychologically prepped to take those risks is much more empowered in their actions than someone who is tossed into a situation where they’re confronting those risks unwarned and unprepared.

I agree with you that conflict can be both healthy and necessary for effective activist movements. I say “can be,” because it depends upon how the conflict is organized – badly handled conflict can end up replicating the oppressions of the wider society, or lead to the group’s dissolution, among other unpleasant outcomes. Indeed, I think a large part of the current discussion revolves around the question of how to promote healthy as opposed to unhealthy conflict.

A couple years ago, I was part of a group organizing a new activist space in London; as we were discussing how to build an organization which reflected our anti-oppression ideals, one member suggested the model of a “transformative” rather than “safe space.” This appealed to me, because it doesn’t expect people to come in already cleansed of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, etc.; it acknowledged that these oppressions will manifest in activist spaces, and represents a commitment to having those conflicts and emerging stronger and more liberated.

(I think there is still a place within movements and struggles for liberation for “safer” or “more secure” or “low-risk” spaces explicitly set aside for people who share one or more specific oppressed status, such as disability, or women with disabilities, etc., just to be around the people who “get it” for a while and away from the rest of us.)

When it comes to trigger warnings, I wonder if you aren’t conflating the misuse of a tool with the tool itself being at fault. The philosophy behind trigger warnings, as it was explained to me, is to be sensitive to the needs of people who have survived real, actual trauma. Both you and the authors of the “Coddling of the American Mind” article frame such warnings in terms of fairly neurotypical people who are afraid of reliving bad experiences. But my outsider’s understanding of trauma is that the experience of being triggered can be much more devastating.

You say that hyper-protection and an obsession with comfort are middle class values we should be leery of – I agree with you. But my experience of growing up middle class is that there’s also a tendency to dismiss or downplay the burdens our culture places upon people who don’t share my middle class privilege, and the accommodations necessary to meet their needs in a group, classroom, or conversational (including written conversation) context. Thus we get the infamous “level playing field” fallacy, and endless streams of white, male, and middle class denial, even within explicitly liberation-oriented movements. This was certainly something I felt coming through from the authors of the Atlantic article.

“trigger warnings are not about comfort. They are about medically documented conditions of mental distress which manifest themselves through a variety of symptoms that can be as powerful as to create a propensity for suicide and self-harm.”

This is where I’m coming from when I support the institution of trigger warnings. How can I, as a person who happily has never experienced trauma, be sensitive in conversations to the needs of those who may experience severe psychological (and perhaps, as a consequence, physical) harm due to certain material which is, for me, largely academic?

My friend has also pushed back against the accusation – made also by the “Coddling” article – of trigger warnings limiting agency:

“The authors seem to forget that a trigger warning is just that: a warning. It is not an obligation to stop reading or leave the room if one feels like they could be a target to the trigger, it is not even a suggestion that they should do so! It is, rather, a way to impart the information necessary for each individual to make a considered decision as to whether they believe that they should confront themselves to the trigger or not.”

This comes back to the point about being “risk aware.” “There’s some material ahead which is going to be very difficult for some of you, perhaps unbearably so, do with that information what you will.” Barbara Wien, in her comment above, gives such an example, in a course which is, as I understand, all about gender violence (meaning that victims of gender violence who know that such a class would be too traumatic for them have probably self-selected out before the class even starts – another kind of trigger warning, if you like). My friend gives other examples from her legal studies, which was not organized around sexual violence but included some sexual violence material:

“At the law school I attended in England, for example, our Criminal Law professor, who was certainly not known for his radical leanings, warned us in advance that the sexual assault lecture was coming up and asked one of his female PhD students to deliver the lecture while he was not present in the classroom. At the law school I am attending in the United States, our Evidence professor gave the class advance warning, instituted a laptop ‘lids down’ policy of privacy in the classroom, and allowed us to ‘opt out’ of class discussions/cold calls ‘no questions asked’ for every class where sexual assault was discussed.

“In both of these cases, a large majority of the class remained and confronted themselves to the difficult material. Maybe for some, or even for most, the material although sensitive was not triggering so there was no need for them to even consider leaving. Maybe for others the material was potentially triggering but they made the choice to confront it nonetheless, perhaps thanks to the trust-enhancing atmosphere created by the professors’ wise choices. Sometimes being cautioned means feeling heard, acknowledged, our experience validated, and that can be enough to make a space safer. And maybe, a few students chose not to attend those classes. Because they felt that they were not ready. Maybe they will be ready at a later point in the semester, or in their life, and they will confront themselves to the material in the way of their choosing. And maybe they will never be ready, and skip this area entirely, and specialize in other types of law. And that will be ok as well.”

The point, as I understand it, is giving people who have experienced trauma, or who are coming from traditionally oppressed backgrounds, the information they need to make informed choices about whether to enter into certain spaces, certain groups, certain actions, certain conversations, and on what terms. Is it your argument that offering trigger warnings is, in fact, counter-productive to this goal? If so, how? And what better strategies would you recommend for achieving those ends?

(Apologies for the monstrously long comment. Brevity, sadly, is not one of my gifts.)

Lincoln, I appreciate your thoughtful response to my article and I wish I could respond to every point in a way that follows your example and brings a new level of nuance.

The very fact that you invite such complexity is itself worth noting. How do we “legislate” (i.e. makes rules about) an area in which there are so very many diverse situations and conditions?

That, as much as anything, is the problem I’m pointing to: the practice which in some of the situations that you describe is quite sensible being elevated to the level of a rule. One can make legislation against discrimination, but legislation that prescribes sensitive and liberated ally behavior? Not really, because rule-culture (a culture that grows up around, for example, keeping everyone safe) is a deadening culture that I believe ends up being more about the protection of the privileged from making gross mistakes than about the oppressed who want to empower themselves.

Yes, I use caucuses in workshops and conferences: invite women/gays/people of color or some other group to be together so they can (perhaps) feel safe from clumsy oppressive cluelessness from the privileged group. But of course within the caucus there is something called internalized oppression that may “violate the safety,” and it turns out that it’s not the liberation-land they’d expected, after all, and if the caucus develops in some different way then maybe the people in it are going for something more important than what’s called “safety:” maybe the members of the group have (perhaps unconsciously) a larger objective called empowerment, which means the gritty work of facing oppression.

Yes, I sometimes avoid “going there” because I’m aware of someone’s special background in a group and want first to have a conversation with them about it. Establishing the option to leave an exercise is usually a good idea — gotta love options! — and in the Adventure Based Learning field it’s popular to have a rule called “challenge by choice.” In some situations I use that rule, and sometimes I don’t, and I won’t even try to go into all the years of experience and knowledge of working with groups to try to parse out when I do and when I don’t.

One way that legislation protects the privileged is when we use it as a cover for our own fear that “we’ll do something wrong.” I’ve been rightly criticized by a black person (I’m white) for holding back on a risky intervention because, from his point of view, I was unwilling to go all the way for his liberation, unwilling to take the facilitator’s risk, i.e. protecting my own self instead of risking in that moment for him. He was right. At that moment of choice it was, yet again, “all about me” — the classical choice of the privileged.

I’m proudest of moments when I supported an oppressed person to do something that could look politically incorrect — ugly, actually — and that was brilliant because it was her work to do for her own growth. Lincoln, I realize as I write this that I think rules are OK for people who are skating on the surface of their teaching or facilitation or action group leadership or whatever, but rules are not OK for people who are reaching deeper and getting therefore into situations that are beyond prescriptions, situations that are existentially juicy and in which both ally and oppressed person are sweating with the risk of really showing up.

A wise facilitator once told me, when I was young and feeling insecure about leading people into tough situations including in workshops: “You can’t go wrong if you love the content, love the people, and love yourself.”

So, Lincoln, I’m sure you could write many more pages of situations for this and situations for that, and I would overlap with you sometimes in terms of what might make sense, and still challenge your wish to make (or accept) rules about it. If I don’t love the content, or love the people, or love myself, then I suppose I’d want a rulebook because rules are mainly about avoiding feared consequences, and fear is the opposite of love.

I tell the story in another column about a heterosexual friend who went all out to love the gay me on a train and to me he was modeling how you, Lincoln, can come from privilege and be an ally. When the discourse on “privilege” gets in the way of self-respect and instead supports the already fearful person of privilege, it has left the land of liberation and that discourse itself is one more version of oppression. I commend my friend’s risk to you. http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/get-real-about-privilege-become-an-ally/

George, thank you for the very thoughtful and in-depth response. Once again, I find there is much wisdom and heart in what you say.

I am much less far along in my path of being an organizer and activist for liberation than you are, George, which is one more reason I value the insights you share in this column and elsewhere so highly. And I realize that part of my journey will require facing up to my fears – my fear of alienating comrades who do not share my privilege status no less than my fear of physical violence at the hands of the status quo’s enforcers. (And I agree with you that the former often leads to the privileged person avoiding tough situations which it would really be better confronted and worked through.)

Finding my balance between being insensitive to the needs, concerns, and experiences of my more marginalized comrades; and being over-insensitive to the point of patronizing – knowing when to step back when my comrades sense real danger which I in my privilege am oblivious to, and knowing when to press forward when the danger is only perceived – this is a balance which I am still working to find, and no doubt will be for a long time to come. In this regard, I thank you for giving me the opportunity to discuss these issues in loving and constructive dialogue (it occurs to me that this discussion provides a model for what my colleague in London meant by “transformative spaces”). And thank you, also, for inviting me to refresh my memory on another of your wonderful columns; I shall certainly endeavor to take your friend’s example to heart.

I wonder, however, if we may not be talking at cross-purposes here. In particular, I’m puzzled that you seem to be operating under the impression that I am advocating liberation-oriented groups should legislate the use of trigger warnings; lay them down as an inflexible rule that must be followed in all circumstances. Nothing of the sort: the reality of liberation groups (and human experience, for that matter) is far too complex and contingent to be able to establish blanket prescriptions which will always produce positive outcomes across the board. (Perhaps even “Love the content, love the people, love yourself” will sometimes lead us astray, difficult as that is to imagine.) And certainly, any attempt to legislate such blanket prescriptions cannot help but ultimately reinforce the existing power structures and dynamics.

I recently read “Oppose and Propose!” Andrew Cornell’s book about Movement for a New Society, and one of the points he raised which has stuck with me is that a lot of practices you and other MNS members helped develop and disseminate throughout the wider activist community (consensus, collective living, use of affinity groups, etc.) came to be treated as *inherently* liberatory, rather than having liberatory *applications* in some circumstances, which always have to be evaluated in terms of “does this particular practice promote liberation in this particular context?” This seems completely sensible to me.

Perhaps the initial misunderstanding was mine: in your arguments in this post and your previous mention of trigger warnings, you did not come across to me as if you were advocating a “let’s be careful and context-specific in our thinking about where it’s constructive to institute use of trigger warnings and safe spaces,” you came across to me as arguing that the pushing for wider use of trigger warnings and “safe spaces” is *inherently* counter-productive and replicates oppressive scripts across the board (or near enough, anyway).

However, in your comment here, you seem to come down more on the side of agreeing that there is a place for trigger warnings and safe spaces in certain circumstances, and you would not attempt to dissuade me and my comrades from pushing back against blanket rejections of trigger warnings (which is how I take my friend’s article form back in October). If this is the case, then I don’t think we’re really in disagreement after all, although I’m still puzzled why the article came across to me as saying “this is a bad idea in most or all circumstances” rather than “this is a tool which should only be used in some circumstances, and shouldn’t be elevated to the status of a Rule for Activists.”

Thank you once again for replying to my comment and helping me think through these complicated issues.

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